Does his blog spam work for him?

[C0ldf1re]

Does anyone know the answer to this? I saw some spam on a blog a while back, and it caught my eye because the keyword tag on the spam URL mentioned my town. I couldn't resist following the URL, and the spammer turned out to be someone I knew from school. Being naturally curious, I asked Google about "link:HisSpamUrl", to see if he was building up the massive backlinks he seemed to be looking for. There were no backlinks at all from the blog in question. I went back to look at a pageview of the blog pages, and there was his backlink embedded without any no-follow tag. I couldn't resist emailing him to say that his spamming was all in vain. He replied that Google was indeed indexing his backlinks and contributing to his site's pagerank, but that Google was "picky" about the links it revealed on a backlink search. He said that there were other secret ways to see the real backlinks, which he couldn't reveal. I am consumed with curiousity to know whether he was telling the truth, or whether he was bluffing. Can you help? Please!